Honey, I’m Home.
(Always always always more feels.)
“Clint!” Natasha yells, slamming the fridge door shut. She can hear the sound of footsteps moving further away from her, and her mouth sets into a tight grimace. Right. It’s on.
She heads upstairs, bound for the roof of the tiny apartment block they’re living in at the moment. Married for a mission, and she’s beginning to wonder why she feels more like a wrung out, downtrodden wife of twenty years than anything else.
Clint’s sitting on the top of the fire escape, eyes on the sky, and Natasha sighs pointedly. Either a wife of twenty years, or a mother of a four year old; those seem to be her two states these days.
“Put another empty carton of milk in the fridge and I’ll make a bed of broken arrows and force you to sleep in it,” she calls over to him, but he ignores her. With a long suffering sigh, she walks over, taking a seat on the fire escape next to him.
Perched precariously over the edge, she can understand why he escapes here. It brings back nights long since lost elsewhere, in warmer climates, higher buildings, and yet the reassuring solidity of the man by her side has never changed.
“You can see Mars tonight,” Clint remarks suddenly, and Natasha’s stirred from her recollections by her irritation returning. “Hmm,” she remarks, refusing to so much as glance upwards. There was a time she could pre-empt his train of thought, but she’s tired tonight, weary to her very bones, and she’d be happy with silence.
“Remember when we thought our worst intergalactic problem would be Martians?” The question is asked quietly, as though from far away, and it causes Natasha to look up sharply. She talks like this sometimes, late at night, but Clint’s the practical one. They don’t look back. They simply can’t afford to.
She looks out across the city then, unable to stand the melancholy creeping into the edges of Clint’s expression. They lost something, after the Chitauri attack, and she’s not sure they can ever recover it. A subtle shift has happened without their knowledge, and now it’s Natasha looking after Clint.
His hand finds hers, the cool metal of the fire escape pressing against her knuckles with the weight of the grip, but she doesn’t mind. She rests her head against his shoulder, closing her eyes for just a moment. Here, she can pretend that nothing’s changed. This could be any night, at any point in their partnership. The wedding ring pressing into her fingers seems mocking somehow, but she ignores it.
Apparently taking her silence as acknowledgement, conducting the same unspoken conversation, Clint laughs softly. “I’ll get the damn milk tomorrow,” he tells Natasha, pressing a kiss to the top of her head, and he senses rather than sees her smile.
It’s not okay, but it will be. If there’s one thing they know, it’s that everything has it’s time. Theirs will come.
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